Using Room List Distribution Group In Exchange 2010…

As the name suggests, “Room List Distribution Group” is a distribution group which has a list of room mailboxes as its members. Why do we need one of these groups, you might ask. In earlier versions of Outlook, if you wanted to search for a room’s availability while setting up a meeting, you needed to add all possible rooms to the meeting request and then use the Scheduling Assistant to view available rooms.

In Exchange 2010, if a room list distribution group has been configured, an end user can add just the distribution group, which will list all the meeting rooms and the availability automatically. Depending on the size of your company, you may want to design the room list groups in a particular way. For example, if you have multiple buildings/sites, you can create a group for each building with the corresponding meeting rooms in those buildings as group members. If you are a small firm with few meeting rooms, you can have a single group covering all the meeting rooms in your office.

Let me explain the topic with an example. It will make things much more clear, I am sure ;)

I have four meeting rooms in my lab and every time an end user wants to book a room, he/she has to add all meeting rooms to get the availability and choose the one that is free. It is not that hard in my example, as I have only four meeting rooms, but I think you get the picture.

Let’s create a room list DG now. First, run the command below to store all available room mailboxes in a variable.

$room = Get-Mailbox | Where-Object {$_.RecipientTypeDetails –eq “RoomMailbox”}

Next step is to create a “room list distribution group” with the the values stored in the variable (room mailboxes) as members.

New-DistributionGroup “Meeting Rooms” –RoomList –Members $room

Once that is done, schedule a meeting and add the new room list distribution group.

Expand the group which will bring all meeting rooms and their availability.

Things become easier for end users and you get to become the star